The Technophile and the World’s Pain

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Two, August 1989.

Technophilia is a common phenomenon. I work with computers; I am in the business of implementing computer solutions to problems, and I come across the attitude all the time. Sometimes the best computer solution is not to use a computer at all—but do you think I can ever convince people of this? I once recommended to one person who insisted he just had to have a computer that a much better solution to his problem would be to hire a clerk with a quill pen. (I lost a few brownie points doing that, but what the hell!) However there was no glamour in that approach and he insisted that it had to be done his way. The customer is always right, even when he is wrong. It cost him untold thousands of dollars for a computer system that he uses for about five minutes every week. But he was happy; he had a high-tech solution; he looked good in his own eyes and could hold his head up proudly in the company of his peers (they all had computers too). He was (and is) an idiot.

Science fiction has always been technophilically inclined and has always tended to attract that kind of mind. Even in the days before Hugo Gernsback coined the word “scientifiction”, H. G Wells and Jules Verne and others of their ilk were revelling in descriptions of new and wonderful machines—technological applications that were sure to solve all our problems (or perhaps exacerbate them). Then Gernsback came along with his never-ending descriptions of television sets and similar devices and he set in motion a trend, a style which has never quite gone out of fashion. (If you ever come across a copy of Gernsback’s novel Ralph 124C41+, do read it—it’s hilariously awful. A perfect example of the cult of the bad.)

The technophilic SF fan really grooves on this. He (they are generally male, though not exclusively so) revels in descriptions of engineering marvels and applications of scientific principles as yet undiscovered. There is a certain amount of this in all of us (I still remember the enormous thrill I got when I first realised that stories about spaceships existed) but most of us grow out of it as we grow up. These days about the only technological achievement that still generates any sense of awe in me is the ever-increasing number of gadgets they can fit into a Swiss Army knife.

However my sense of wonder and love of gadgets is not completely dead—I have a watch which I bought in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. Apart from telling the time (how boring), it has a built in calculator, stop watch and alarm, and it also allows me to store telephone numbers and a calendar of events. It has a little keyboard attached and at the beginning of the year I type in the dates of the deadlines I have to meet for production of this column and every three months it beeps at me and I feel embarrassed because I haven’t written anything yet. So I look up Alex’s telephone number in it and ring him to apologise.

A friend at work found it fascinating. He couldn’t believe a watch could do all those things.

“Is it IBM compatible?” he asked.

The twiddly bits are all very well but what happens when the batteries run out? All the information stored in the watch vanishes, that’s what happens, and when the new battery is fitted you must laboriously type it all in again.

I explained all this to my friend one day when the batteries went flat. He was vastly amused.

“Fortunately,” I said, “I had all the information backed up.”

I was thinking of the piece of paper on which I had carefully written everything down in anticipation of just such an eventuality.

“Oh yes?” said my colleague. “Backed up in the grandfather clock, is it?”

A few years ago such a device was pure science fiction and that little anecdote would probably have been an incident in a story in a magazine. Nobody would have raised an eyebrow, and the gadget freaks would have loved it.

In its heyday, Astounding (later Analog) was particularly noted for publishing works of this nature. John Campbell, the editor, was always on the look out for a new gadget, a new bit of science, and when he found it, he was often so overwhelmed with the cleverness of the idea that he let the normal story values fly right out of the window. More artistically minded fans often accused Astounding of publishing wiring diagrams rather than stories and there was a certain amount of truth in the accusation (there still is).

The phrase usually used to describe this sort of story is “hard science fiction”; and there is an inbuilt assumption that stories of this type concentrate exclusively on the so-called hard sciences-physics, chemistry, engineering—the mathematical disciplines.

There are two things wrong with this assumption—firstly it assumes that there is a close relationship between science and science fiction; and secondly it assumes that there is a relationship between fiction and reality. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily true and if you examine them closely you start to suspect that hard science fiction has no reality outside the fevered imagination of a few technomaniacs.

For a story to succeed on any but the most trivial of levels it is necessary for the author successfully to invoke a “willing suspension of disbelief”. While you are reading the story you have to be completely immersed in it, to weep at the tragedies and laugh at the triumphs. The author must convince you of the reality of the story. Inducing that mood in a reader is one of the most difficult tasks a writer faces. To fail is to lose the audience.

There are many tricks of the trade which the skilled writer will use to induce this mood. One of them is to project an air of realism by describing technological fantasies in such a way as to force you to accept them (at the time of reading). Only later when the magic spell is broken, do you start to question it… It really is just a trick, a writing technique, one of many tools which the skilful writer has at his beck and call. In the hands of a master it can be wonderfully convincing and leads to story experiences that are truly mind-blowing. In the hands of the less skilled, it breaks the spell in mid-sentence. The story fails and dies.

The relationship between science and science fiction is minimal. It is only a manifestation of this tool of the trade and therefore should not be take too seriously. The map is not the territory. No one in their right mind seriously believes that speculations about slow glass, for example, have any scientific validity (if they did then Bob Shaw would be a millionaire many times over). However to read the novel Other Days, Other Eyes is a truly moving and satisfying experience because as you read Shaw convinces you of the truth of it all. He is not a millionaire, but he is a truly talented writer and he uses his toolbox like a master.

But it isn’t science, even though it sounds like it.

Hard science fiction is rarely, if ever, about scientific facts or principles. It is fiction, a story. If you like, it is a beautifully told lie. It is not true. Therefore to assume that the world of a hard SF story has any congruency with the real world is a dangerous conclusion to come to and is rarely valid.

The opposite tack is equally as silly. Technophobes are modern day Luddites and anything that smacks of science or engineering is anathema to them. Quite often this is a product of fear of the new and unknown. I often have to install computer systems in offices which have never seen a computer before, and I have to train the people who are going to use the systems. Initially there is hostility and a reluctance to type anything in on the keyboard. There is a feeling that it is all too complicated, that the system is impossible to learn. Perhaps if the wrong thing is typed in everything will break irretrievably and everybody will laugh at the buffoon who did it. What a dingbat! The fear is very real, and it must not be sneered at or dismissed as silly. It is not silly. Computers are complicated and frightening, and the fear of ridicule is something which all of us share.

I generally show people where the games are and let them loose. There is nothing quite like zapping Klingons to remove the fear of the keyboard!

I suspect this attitude partly accounts for the popularity of fantasy stories (as opposed to the hard SF variety). Fantasy is easily assimilated, no arcane knowledge or deep training in an academic discipline is required. You can just soak it up through the pores. Of course the genre has even less connection with reality than the hard SF we were discussing before. It takes two steps backward, if you like, whereas hard SF takes only one. (At least SF pretends to have some connection with the world of the senses. Virtually no fantasy stories would or could claim this for themselves.) That is not necessarily a bad thing though. 

Of course things are not really as clear cut as all this and the two extremes merge into one another. Clifford Simak, for example, wrote stories such as Way Station or Time and Again, or (his most famous) City, all of which were easily classifiable as hard SF but all of which also made critical judgments about the technology they employed. Poul Anderson has written pure fantasies such as The Broken Sword and The Merman’s Children which have technological “explanations” intimately woven into their fabrics.

The point I am making is that the unthinking acceptance of either view is indefensible. Technophobia and technophilia are opposite sides of the same coin whether we are talking about implementing computer systems (or whatever) in the real world or whether we are talking about the kind of books we like to read. I like some hard SF books (I detest others). Equally I like some fantasy books (and I loathe some as well). The important thing is not to be frightened of it, whichever side you approach it from, and to accept whatever is best suited for the moment and the purpose at hand. That is quite a trivial thing to say but it is by no means an easy thing to do. Just remember all those long sterile arguments about: “which is better, fantasy or science fiction?”

Technology for its own sake is dangerous. But so is rejection of it simply because it is technology.